INTERVIEW
Interview: designing tomorrow’s estate
At Healthcare Estates 2025, Sam Vijatov of Innovation Fire Engineering interviewed Paul Mathews, director at Murphy Philipps Architects, winner of the 2025 Healthcare Estates Architectural Practice of the Year Award.
Sam Vijatov of Innovation Fire Engineering (left) interviewed Paul Mathews, director at Murphy Philipps Architects – part of a packed Healthcare Estates 2025.
Sam Vijatov: Congratulations on winning Architectural Practice of the Year. How would you describe your style and philosophy as an architect practice? Paul Mathews: We started in 1997, so about 28 years ago now. We set out originally to do a mix of healthcare and other stuff, but over the years as we’ve developed and the practice has grown and our depth of experience has grown, we’ve become specialists in the [healthcare] area. Health is our passion – we do everything from acute hospitals through to [projects] in the community and all sorts of stuff in between. So, it’s what we do. It’s our bread and butter. We’re extremely good at it. Our philosophy is always to try and build something better to help people. You’re going to hospital
because there’s something [wrong] with you, so it’s about trying to create a better space for those moments.
Could you take me through a recent project that captures what Murphy Philipps is all about? PM: At the IHEEM Awards we [also] won an award for Hellesdon Rivers Centre,1
so that’s something we’ve done
recently; it’s fairly typical of the mental health work we do. We’ve done a couple of mental health projects this year. That one involved a lot of service user engagement, and I think that is absolutely key to delivering a good healthcare project. Your end users are the people that are going to experience that space and you have to understand – whether it’s staff or whether it’s patients or whether it’s carers – how they’re going to use that space. That’s a key part of what we do. So, at Hellesdon we engaged not only with the staff on the wards, but with those people that were already using the facilities – a very outdated institutional space – to understand what the problems were with that, and then tried to address those in the new design. Similarly, another very high-profile project that we’ve done this year is for The Samaritans in Central London. I wouldn’t say that’s a typical project for us because it’s not a pure healthcare scheme and it doesn’t have any clinical space in it, but it very much fits our brief. Again we consulted with the volunteers, found out the types of spaces and the types of issues that they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis, and brought those into the design. So, in summary,
Health is our passion – we do everything from acute hospitals through to [projects] in the community and all sorts of stuff in between. Our philosophy is always to try and build something better to help people. You’re going to hospital because there’s something [wrong], so it’s about trying to create a better space.
38 Health Estate Journal May 2026
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